Contents

Products and Services

Copper uses a method of storing and transferring digital assets that it calls "Walled Garden." This method employs a combination of cryptography, cold wallets, physical transferrence, and personal validation by authorized human operators of the system.[2][3]

Walled Garden

Copper's platform includes technology designed to protect customer digital assets by putting them in "cold storage" wallets, as well as protecting them with a multi-signature cosign system. This works by splitting the private keys of these assets into three parts, then requiring trusted custodians (a Copper representative and an authorized member of a trusted third-party institution) in the Copper platform to personally "sign off" on the transaction before the private keys can be moved from cold storage.[4]

"Air-gapping"

In March 2019, the company announced that the company would begin employing air-gapping, a cybersecurity measure popular with high-level government and military institutions, to its platform's security. Although in the past air-gapping required the physical transference of external computer hardware, like a USB stick, Copper uses encrypted QR codes, which can be shown to a cold storage machine and scanned, validating the transaction. This is a required step for the Copper platform's software to complete a transaction. In addition to adding an extra level of security, carrying out transactions in this way also makes the process faster than the process would take if USB sticks or similar hardware were used.[5][6]

Background

Copper was created in 2018 by Dmitri Tokarev, a graduate of the Imperial College of London and the former CTO and Partner at Dolfin Financial. Its trading platform was developed by coders working remotely around the world, though their website says that their software development team is currently headquartered in Moscow, Russia.[7]